Kennedy

The coffee place on the corner of Forty-Fourth had a radio.

It was an old one, a big brown wooden box with a dial, on a shelf behind the counter between the coffee machine and a photograph of a football team, and the man in the white apron who had been going up and down the pavement all morning with his tray of paper cups had turned it on at some point, and turned it up, as far as it would go, and propped the door of the shop open with a chair, so that the people sitting against the wall of the station on the coats and the cardboard could hear it.

Tom heard it from the steps.

He would not have heard it an hour ago. He could hear now. Not well; the whine was still there at the back of everything, high and thin, and the world came through it flat and from a long way off, as if he were listening to it through a door. But the radio was turned up as far as it would go, and it was a voice he knew, the voice of the man on the national service, the man in New Westminster who read the news at one and six and had read it, it seemed to Tom, for his whole life, and the voice came across the pavement out of the open door of the coffee place very clear and very level, the way it always did.

He went to the door to hear it better. He did not decide to. He found that he was standing in the doorway of the coffee place with the dust on him, among six or seven other people who had found that they were standing there too, white, with paper cups, listening.

“Departures have been suspended at both New York airports,” said the man on the radio, “and passengers are being held inside the terminals rather than sent home. Desmond Achebe is at Kennedy. Desmond, what is it like there.”

And another voice, younger, close, with a great deal of room round it, as if it were standing in a very big hall: “Hugh, it is very full and it is very quiet.”

Somebody in the coffee place said Jesus. Not about anything. Just to say something.

“The boards have been frozen for about forty minutes,” said the younger voice. “Every departure reads the same word and it has not changed, and people have stopped looking up at them, which is the thing you notice.”

He listened to a little more of it. The two thousand people in the hall. The seating gone an hour ago. The screens up there carrying Grand Central, so that everybody in the airport was watching the station, and a family ten feet away, the children watching the screen and the parents watching the children. He found that he was looking up, at the ceiling of the coffee place, which was pressed tin and brown with old smoke, as if the screen were up there and he could see on it the steps he had just come from.

Then Costello said his name, from the foot of the steps, and he went.

---

He went back to the steps.

Costello was at the foot of them with the superintendent from the RAC, the two of them standing side by side being one radio, and a fireman with a grey face, and a man from the station’s own staff in a dark suit with a list in his hand. Teresa was on the top step, with the door they had been carrying, STATIONMASTER, propped against the wall beside her, empty now, and her paper cup.

“Anything?” said Teresa.

“They’ve stopped the airports.”

“Why would they stop the airports?”

“I don’t know.”

She looked at him. She did not say anything. She looked down the avenue, south, where the tape was across it at Forty-Second Street, and the sirens, and beyond the tape the city, the whole of it, going on, with its towers in the sun, and he saw her look at it as if she had never seen it before and was trying to learn it fast.

His radio, on his shoulder, made a different noise.

---

It was the same noise and it was different. It was the hiss and the roar, the sea in the shell, the way it had been all morning, with the fragments coming up out of it, Central, a number, a street. And then, at eleven forty-eight, at the same moment, all of the fragments were the same word.

He felt it before he understood it. He felt it in the radio on his shoulder and in the radios on the shoulders of every officer on the pavement and the steps and at the tape, all of them at once, the same change in the noise, the way you feel a change in the wind. Then the words came up out of it, a lot of voices, on top of each other, on every channel, the City’s and the fire service’s and the ambulances’, none of them finishing, all of them saying it.

Kennedy.

Kennedy. Explosion at Kennedy.

An explosion at the airport. Kennedy. The Pan Am terminal.

Kennedy, Kennedy, all units, an explosion at Kennedy.

Costello at the foot of the steps had stopped talking to the superintendent. They were both standing very still. The superintendent had his little black radio up at his ear, and his face was changing, and Costello was looking at it change.

From the open door of the coffee place, across the pavement, very clear, the man on the national service.

“There has been a second explosion.”

Everybody on the pavement turned their heads.

“It was at Kennedy International Airport, at about a quarter to twelve, and we believe it was in or near the Pan American terminal. That is the whole of what we have.” A pause. Not a long one. “There was an explosion at Grand Central Station at twenty-three minutes to eleven. There has now been an explosion at Kennedy at about a quarter to twelve. Those are two things that have happened. I am not going to join them together for you. When somebody who knows joins them together, we will tell you, and we will tell you who said it.”

On the pavement against the wall of the station a woman began to cry, very quietly, with her face in the shoulder of the man beside her, whom she did not know.

“The line from Kennedy has gone. I do not know anything further about the line, or about the…”

The voice stopped.

It stopped in the middle, the way a man stops on a stair when he has put his foot down on a step that is not there. It was not long. It was less time than it took the woman against the wall to lift her face out of the stranger’s shoulder and look at the door of the coffee place. Then it started again, on something shorter.

“I do not know anything further.”

---

Nobody on the pavement said anything for a moment.

Then everybody did. All at once, along the wall and on the steps and at the tape, the same thing, in different words, the thing the man on the national service would not say. He heard it in front of him and behind him and on the radio on his shoulder. Two. There’s two. It’s not the gas. It was never the gas. The airport. The station and the airport. Trains and planes. Somebody’s doing the trains and the planes. Somebody’s doing the transport.

They’re doing the transport.

He stood on the steps and heard it go down the avenue like the word gas had gone, an hour before, down the tape, like a wind, except that this time nobody said it as if they had been told it by somebody. They said it as if they had worked it out themselves. And they had. He had. He had worked it out on the steps in the second before anybody said it, the same as everybody: the station and the airport, the trains and the planes, the two ways in and out of the city that everybody used, struck an hour apart, and between them, behind them, in front of them, everything else that moved.

The bridges. The tunnels. The subway. The buses. The terminals.

The boats.

He looked at Teresa.

She was standing on the top step. She had not moved. She had the crushed paper cup in her hand and her face was the colour of the dust, which was the colour it had been all morning, and it was not that, it was something under the dust, and he knew what it was.

“Teresa.”

“I know,” she said.

---

At the foot of the steps a fire appliance that had been parked on the avenue since eleven started its engine.

It was one of the two from the company round the corner, red, with its ladders on its back and its lights going round, and it had been standing at the kerb with its crew inside the station carrying, and now its crew came out of the holes at a run, four of them, and down the steps past Tom, and climbed up onto it, and it pulled away from the kerb with its siren starting, and turned round in the middle of Vanderbilt Avenue in three goes, and went south, to the tape at Forty-Second Street, and through it, and east.

Then an ambulance. Then another. Then the second appliance.

He watched them go. They went east and south, one after another, with their sirens going, through the tape and away along Forty-Second Street towards the river and the tunnel and the long road to Queens and the airport, and the avenue in front of the station, which had been full of them since eleven, was a little less full, and then a little less, and the noise of the sirens moved off east with them and got thinner, and the people sitting against the wall of the station watched them go.

“Where are they going?” said the woman who had cried, to nobody.

“Kennedy,” said somebody.

“But we’re still here,” said the woman.

Nobody answered her.

---

The order came at five to twelve, on foot.

It came in the shape of a constable from the Fifty-First Street house, Hughes, a young one, two years on, who came running down Vanderbilt Avenue from the north with his hat in his hand and his face red and his radio dead on his shoulder like everybody’s, and came up to Costello at the foot of the steps and stood in front of him, panting, and said it.

Tom heard it from the step above. He heard most of it.

“Sarge. From the Inspector. From the borough. They rang the house on the landline, it’s the only thing that works, and the house sent me.” Hughes took a breath. “Every terminal on the island. Every transport terminal. Penn. The bus terminal. The heliport. The piers. The Whitehall Terminal, at the Battery. Every terminal gets officers from the nearest house that can spare them, now, to clear it, or hold it, or whatever the people there say. Because if it’s the transport…” He stopped. “Because they think it’s the transport.”

Costello looked at him.

“The Battery,” he said. “Who’s got the Battery?”

“The First Precinct, Sarge, but they’ve got nobody, they’re all on the march, the march goes right past them to the speeches. The borough says the nearest house that can spare anybody.”

“Nobody can spare anybody.”

“I know, Sarge. That’s what the Inspector said. And then he said send them anyway.”

Costello stood there for a moment at the foot of the steps of Grand Central with the dust coming out of the holes above him in its slow grey breath. Then he looked up the steps.

“Moran.”

Teresa looked down at him.

“You know Whitehall,” said Costello. “You go through it twice a day. You know the boarding hall and the stairs and the staff and the doors and where the people go when you tell them to go.” He did not ask her. He was not telling her either. He was saying it the way you say a thing that is simply the case, like the angles of a triangle. “And you know the boats.”

“Yes, Sarge.”

“Keane goes with you.” Costello put his hand in his trouser pocket and took out a set of keys on a ring with a plastic tag on it and held it up. “Car Six. It’s on Forty-Fifth, by the hydrant, where Hughes left it on Friday and I told him not to. The roads’ll be bad. Take the east side. Get as close as you can and walk the rest. When you get there, find whoever’s in charge of the terminal, which’ll be the stationmaster, and do what they tell you, and if they want it cleared, clear it, and if anybody stops you, tell them I sent you.” He threw the keys.

Tom caught them.

“Go,” said Costello.

---

They went up the avenue at a run, past the people sitting against the wall of the station, past the nurse in the cardigan, who looked up at them going and lifted one hand, past the coffee place with its door propped open with a chair and the radio inside it saying it is eleven fifty-six, to Forty-Fifth, and round the corner, and there was Car Six, by the hydrant, white, with the City’s crest on the door and a parking ticket under its wiper that some traffic warden had put there at half past nine this morning before any of it, and the ticket said A£40, and Teresa took it off the windscreen and looked at it and put it in her pocket.

“Drive,” said Teresa. “I’ll do the radio.”

“The radio doesn’t work.”

“Then I’ll do the window,” said Teresa, and got in.

He got in. He started it. It started first time, which Car Six never did. He put the lights on and the siren and pulled out from the hydrant into Forty-Fifth Street, which was empty, entirely empty, in the middle of the day, in the middle of midtown, not a car in it from one end to the other, only people, on the pavements, standing, looking east, the way everybody on the pavements of the island was looking that minute, towards the river, and Queens, and the airport.

At the corner of Lexington he turned south.

Beside him, with her face to the window, watching the street go past, Teresa said, in a voice he had never heard from her, very ordinary:

“Eddie’s on the half-eleven out of St George.”

He did not say anything. He drove.

“It’s twenty-five minutes across,” said Teresa, to the window. “If they left on time. They always leave on time. Eddie says the half-eleven’s the only boat in the harbour that’s never once been late.” She was silent for a moment. “So it gets into Whitehall at five to twelve, and they tie up, and everybody gets off, and they clean it, and everybody gets on for the twelve-fifteen back, and it’s the busiest one of the day, the twelve-fifteen, because of the lunchtimes. And Eddie stands at the rail on the upper deck and watches them get on. He always does. He says it’s the best part of the job. He says you can tell everything about a city by how it gets on a boat.”

The lights at Forty-Second were red. He went through them.

“Five to twelve,” said Teresa. “That’s now.”

She did not say anything else. She sat with her face to the window and her hands in her lap, white, with the crushed paper cup in one of them, which she had not let go of since the steps, and the street went past outside the window, south, Lexington, Forty-First, Fortieth, Thirty-Ninth, empty, the shops open and nobody in them, the people on the pavements, all of them, looking east.